Arcadia Falls (17 page)
Authors: Carol Goodman
“Miss Eberhardt,” he said one day with an elaborate, drawn-out
sigh, “you might as well come up here and pose because you are all Miss Beecher will draw anyway.”
Gertrude Sheldon tittered and said something to another girl that made her blush. I saw Vera growing angry and was afraid she’d make a scene. It was her one flaw, my poor darling, her temper. And I knew that Gertrude Sheldon particularly irritated her. I think it was because Vera was, quite unfoundedly, afraid that what people said about Gertrude was true of her: that she was a rich, idle woman who was only playing at art.
“Very well,” I said, putting my pencil down. “I will.”
The class was perfectly silent as I walked to the front of the room. The model had come in, but she hadn’t disrobed yet. I climbed onto the raised dais where a musty old settee draped in moth-eaten shawls served as background and pedestal for our models. Turning to face the room, I was surprised at how different it looked from this perspective, as if I had climbed a high mountaintop and was looking down upon a valley. It reminded me of the finales I had drawn in my fairy tales, the heroine silhouetted against the setting sun. Instead of a sunset, an embroidered Chinese shawl hung behind me, but I imagined I had become the heroine of my old stories. The girl who was not afraid.
I took off my muslin smock and began to unbutton my dress.
“Miss Eberhardt …” Virgil Nash began, approaching the dais. “The rules state …”
“That Life Drawing class be provided with a model. Does it say who that model should be?” I asked, all the time undoing the buttons down the front of my dress. “Am I any different from Suzie, here? Are any of us?” My hands were shaking, but my voice was steady. I thanked God that I had recently given up wearing a corset … and then smiled to think what an odd thing that was to thank God for! It was the smile that saved me. I saw it reflected in Vera’s face. Her gaze held mine as I peeled back my shirtwaist and camisole in one movement. I let them fall loosely
around my waist as I sat on the settee and faced the class. Vera was the first to pick up her pencil and begin to draw. I kept my eyes on her for the rest of the class and imagined that she and I were alone in the room. That’s what kept my spine straight and my chin held up for the next hour. She gave me the strength. No one spoke. Even Virgil Nash had taken up pencil and begun to draw instead of circulating and critiquing. The room was filled with the soft whicker of pencil on paper. It sounded like snow falling through pine trees. I felt as though I had
become
a tree, a great white pine standing in the forest, snow sifting through my needled boughs….
I could have stayed there forever. The hour ended sooner than I thought it would. Only when I tried to stand did I realize I had lost all feeling in my legs. Vera came to my rescue and held my muslin smock up in front of me as I fumbled the buttons of my shirtwaist. She carried my sketchpad for me and whispered in my ear that I must come to her house for tea. She was afraid I’d catch a chill if I didn’t. I readily agreed, but as we were leaving Mr. Nash asked me to stay a moment “for a word.” I nodded to Vera that it was all right and said that I’d meet her downstairs.
I expected a lecture and was prepared to tell him that I’d never do it again, but instead he turned his easel around so that I could see the drawing he’d begun. What I saw took my breath away. While Vera had drawn me as her drooping lily, Virgil Nash had captured how I felt up there on the dais. He’d drawn me as the girl from my stories, the heroine I’d made up and come to the city looking for.
“I’d like to finish this,” he said. “Would you consider posing for me privately?”
It did not occur to me to say no.
As it turned out, it was the least that I could do for Mr. Nash. When it came out (I’ve always suspected that it was Gertrude Sheldon who complained to the board) that he had allowed a student to disrobe and model in class, he was fired. Vera was so
incensed that she withdrew her membership from the League and proposed to Mr. Nash that they form their own art school. Her home at Arcadia Falls would be the perfect setting. He readily agreed.
I’ve always wondered if his decision was influenced by the fact that I would be there. By then Vera had asked me to come to Arcadia, not just as a fellow student, but as her companion. Should I have suspected that Nash’s interest in me went beyond the aesthetic? Should I have told Vera
not
to include him in our “sylvan idyll”? Would things have been different if Vera and I had gone to Arcadia without him? Perhaps. But the seeds were sown that day I peeled away my outer layers in front of the Life Drawing class. What Vera saw was her lily—a symbol of purity held by an angel. I’m not sure that Virgil Nash saw me more clearly, but he saw me as I liked to think of myself and I wasn’t willing to give that up. Not even for Vera. We came to paradise already carrying the seeds of its destruction, but I’m afraid that is the way of all paradises.
Beneath this line, Lily had drawn a small fleur-de-lis signaling the end of this first section. It seems like a good place to stop for the night. I go upstairs, hugging the journal to my chest, place it on the nightstand, and turn off the light. I listen to the wind in the pine trees that surround the cottage. It is gentler than last night’s keening. Tonight it sounds like pencils on paper, and I fall asleep with the strange notion that all of Arcadia Falls is a pencil drawing and each night it draws itself anew.
W
hen I wake up the next morning, my dream of Arcadia as a drawing seems to have come true. Fog shrouds the woods surrounding my cottage, turning the view from my bedroom window into a lightly smudged charcoal sketch. Lily’s journal lies on my nightstand, a lilac ribbon marking where I stopped reading last night. I touch the worn cloth cover, recalling the last lines I read:
We came to paradise already carrying the seeds of its destruction
. And yet, she and Vera had lived here happily for nineteen years before disaster struck. What kind of love triangle smoldered so long before bursting into flames? I pick up the book. In the still of the fog-locked house,
I have the feeling that all I have to do is open it to populate this cottage—and the surrounding woods and the campus—not only with the three main players in that drama, but all the fairytale maidens and monsters that Vera and Lily created together.
And as soon as I turn to the marked place in the book I
do
hear the creak of a door opening downstairs, and a voice shouting … but it’s not a character out of one of Vera and Lily’s stories. It’s Sally.
She’s already in her room by the time I get out into the hall, pulling jeans and T-shirts out of her suitcases. “You’re not dressed yet?” she asks when she sees me standing in her doorway. “You’re going to be late for class.”
It’s exactly what I’ve said to her every morning for the last year. Have we changed places overnight? “Um, I wasn’t sure there would be class,” I say.
“They announced at breakfast that classes would be held as usual,” Sally says, finally settling on a T-shirt silkscreened with images of little girls in short dresses, Mary Janes, and bobby socks. Across the back is the name of the band the Vivian Girls.
“You’ve been to breakfast?” I ask, more stunned at that news than at the dean’s decision to hold classes on the day after a student’s death. Sally has refused breakfast for the last year, claiming that it made her nauseated to even think about food before noon.
“Sure, everybody goes,” Sally responds distractedly as she rejects one pair of jeans in favor of a seemingly identical pair. “They’ve got waffles and blueberry pancakes with real maple syrup. Hannah says that they make their own maple syrup in the spring and everybody helps. Anyways, I’d better go. I promised to meet Haruko before art class to show her my cartoons.”
She’s gone before I can ask how she’s dealing with Isabel Cheney’s death, but really, it’s not necessary. Clearly, she’s fine. I can only hope that the rest of my students are doing so well.
In Folklore class I start out by asking if anyone has anything they want to share about Isabel. After a moment of silence, Hannah Weiss raises a timid hand. “I feel bad that I never got to know her better. She was always working so hard—”
“What you really feel bad about is that you didn’t like her better,” Tori Pratt says.
“That’s not fair,” Hannah cries, blushing. “I didn’t
dislike
her, it’s just that she was a hard person to get to know.”
“She was,” Clyde says from behind the curtain of his hair. He’s hunched so far over that I can’t make out his eyes. But then he rakes the hair off his face and I see that those eyes are bloodshot and ringed with dark circles. He seems to have taken Isabel’s death especially hard. “You had the feeling when you talked to her that she was planning her future. And you weren’t in it. It’s funny that she wanted to study history.”
A pall of silence falls over the class. Perhaps they’re all thinking—as I am—about what a waste it is: a smart, talented girl with her whole future ahead of her, gone because of a careless slip. Or perhaps they’ve just run out of things to say. I’m about to go on with today’s lesson when Chloe, who’s been silent so far, raises her hand. She looks even worse than Clyde, her greasy, unbrushed hair hanging lank around her face, her eyes rimmed with red.
“Yes, Chloe?” I ask.
“I wrote a poem,” Chloe says in a small voice. “I call it ‘The Death of Summer.’”
“Would you like to read it?” I ask.
Chloe nods and opens her laptop. The machine chimes as it powers up—like a bell tolling for Isabel’s death.
“‘The Death of Summer,’” she reads.
Indifference kills in this cold world: a flower
ignored by rain in early spring will die,
and even in midsummer heat, a sigh
of love’s ephemeral, dies with the hour
.
And when love’s just a glance, brief touch, mere smiles,
and cruel fate kills, love’s never harvested,
but love yet lives in memory; we’re wed
now, all of us, by youth’s tremors and trials
and will remain so in our lifelong thoughts
,
the same way sunshine often floats
on rivers, streams, amidst the breezestrewn air
,
in sudden aftermath of violent storms
.
There is a dark side to us, cruelty warns,
but also art and love. If we could dare
.
The class is silent when she’s done. “That’s lovely, Chloe,” I say at last, although in truth there’s something about the poem I find unsettling. Perhaps it’s the idea of the bond between the two girls lasting for eternity. After all, they hadn’t even seemed to like each other.
“We should have some kind of memorial,” a girl whose name I’ve forgotten says. “With poems and songs and art about Isabel. After all, this is supposed to be a school for the arts.”
Others chime in, volunteering suggestions for projects honoring Isabel’s memory: a slide collage of pictures of her, a compilation of her favorite songs, poems written in her honor.
“We should have it on the autumn equinox,” Chloe says.
I’d have thought they’d all have had enough of pagan ceremonies, but a murmur of consent moves through the room. Chloe jots down notes and takes names of volunteers. Clearly she’s become the leader of this new group, just as she was the leader of the First Night festival. If I don’t say anything, the rest of the class will become a meeting of the Equinox Club.
“I’m glad you’ve all found a way of expressing your loss over Isabel,” I say loudly enough to capture their attention. “Using words and images to reframe real life seems to be a tradition at Arcadia.” I’m thinking of what I read in Lily’s journal last night, how she had seemed to first invent Vera and then herself out of the stories she told and drew for her sisters, and then how she had spent her last months at Arcadia trying to make sense of her life by writing it all down in her journal. In between she had coauthored fairy tales like
The Changeling Girl
. Had that, too, been a way of telling her story? Had the fairy tale told how Lily had left her old life behind on the dairy farm for the life of an artist in the city? And if that were true, had Vera Beecher been the witch?
“Yesterday I told you that your first assignment for the term was to find out what in Vera Beecher’s and Lily Eberhardt’s lives led them to tell the changeling story as they did. Your second assignment is to write your own changeling story. If you could exchange your life with someone else’s, would you? Whose life would you choose? Would you ever want to go back to your old life? You might want to think about how the changeling story describes the death of an old life in exchange for the birth of something new.”
“The way the summer goddess dies and is reborn as the autumn goddess?” Chloe asks.
“Something like that,” I say. Although I’m reluctant to subscribe to the pagan theology that seems to be so popular here at Arcadia, I can see how it might help them to deal with Isabel’s death to think about it in these terms. Would it have helped Sally accept her father’s death? I wonder. Maybe not, but it might help her accept that the old life we had with Jude is gone. “Certainly it’s an idea you can explore,” I conclude.